This paper deals with the perception of German enunciative modalities, like assertion, interrogation and exclamation, by non-native speakers with French as their native language. It aims to study the relationship between the perception of different modalities and the morphosyntactic and intonative structures of the target and source languages. The first part of the paper describes corpus acquisition and acoustic stimuli recording conditions, together with the perception of the test protocol. The second part presents the results of this test, including the time reaction to the audio stimuli, which carry the various enunciative modalities, and the validity of the responses. The third and last part analyses the intonative and morphosyntactic structures of the target language and interprets the results of the perception test. This study confirms the existence of intonative and morphosyntactic markers, which influence reaction time. Early onset of these segmental and prosodic markers enhances the precocious anticipation of correct decisions, and thus shorter reaction times. The results of this research will be compared with our previous study on “perception of French enunciative modalities by German native speakers”.

The notion of universal audience raised many queries to the point that it even appeared as a “contradiction in terms” (« contradiction dans les termes ») (Meyer, 1999: 266). We propose to illustrate some of its special features with a passage from the Counterfeiters (1925). This is the fragment in which Bernard and Olivier comment upon the theme of essay. The reflection will include three stages: 1) we will go back to the special characteristics of the notion of universal auditorium; 2) starting with these reflections and commentaries by Perelman and Olbrechts - Tyteca (2008 [1958]) on a fragment from Tristam Shandy, we will study the embedding of the various auditorium types in the fragment of choice; 3) we will perceive the auditorium as one of the regulatory concepts (Cassin, 1990: 33) of Perelman’s system. In our view, it is these regulatory concepts that enable the Nouvelle Rhétorique to effectively discuss the exercise in the form of an essay which, in itself, fits within the precise model of the twentieth century’s Honnête Homme opposed by Perelman’s system.

The present paper focuses on the problem of automatic translation based on the object-oriented approach proposed by Wiesław Banyś. The author carries out the analysis of the French noun parfum, whose proper translation into Polish may seem too complex from the point of view of automatic translation, as it has many Polish equivalents depending on the context of its use. The paper is an attempt to show how, thanks to the object oriented approach, the problem of choosing an appropriate target language equivalent is solved.

The perception of sounds of a foreign tongue influences the quality of comprehension and speaking in the language, as well as learning how to read and write properly. The differentiation and identification of sounds enables the development of aural-verbal memory, subsequently associating particular sound patterns with particular meanings. In other words, a developed perception of sounds ensures an efficient communication in a foreign language. Since learners perceive foreign sounds with varied proficiency, the teacher should recognize the difficulties and undertake remedial measures to facilitate learning progress. This article aims to present an educational tool, currently in development, designed to examine the perception of the French language sounds by Polish-speaking learners. It will allow teachers to identify encountered difficulties and later evaluate the development of sound differentiation and identification skills, and therefore evaluate the results of remedial measures used in the process when teaching the French language.

Traditional dictionaries and electronic dictionaries do not contain necessary information enabling automatic processing of idiomatic expressions. Many a time, an entry, even in a monolexical form, must be representative for the idiom (M e j r i, 2008). Our aim is to create a dictionary of compound nouns customized for the natural language processing. In the following paper we are considering the ways of creating a dictionary of Polish compound nouns. We first describe morpho-syntactic properties of compound nouns, then we propose a morphological analyzer for Polish which enables declination of (i) indeclinable compound nouns ( jo-jo, lelum polelum), (ii) declinable compound nouns (ślepa uliczka, chude lata), (iii) compound nouns containing a declinable and indeclinable elements (herod-baba, języczek u wagi, kraina mlekiem i miodem płynąca).

The objective of this analysis is to find out the main discursive strategies used by two acclaimed Chicana authors: Gloria Anzaldúa and Sandra Cisneros. Due to the fact that all of the texts mentioned above are written in English with Spanish entries, some discursive strategies turn out to be translation procedures. These are literal translation of idiomatic and vocative expressions, paraphrases, inter- and intralingual explications, and even leaving some Spanish items without any translation. Such procedures used in the original multilingual texts assume a subversive strategy that aims at coercing the Anglo-American hegemonic language and culture into coexisting with the Mexican minority ones in the same text.

The aim of the article is to study media textual images of the Law and Justice political party in selected French electronic news reports.

Even a cursory look at the specialized texts functioning within a given field of knowledge leads us to state that the terminology used in them is not homogeneous. That heterogeneity manifests itself at different levels and implies at least a few linguistic phenomena. One of them is variability or modifiability of some terminological forms appointed to designate one and the same concept. The subject of the analysis undertaken in this paper is the French and Polish terminology in the field of individual retirement plans, while its purpose is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of variant terms occurring in the texts.

The aim of the article is to analyse the impact of theoretical knowledge of discussed argument on the structure, cohesion and linguistic variety of essays written by students — learners of Italian. The comparative study of twelve essays entitled “Il Made in Italy” composed by six students (the first one written spontaneously without substantial preparation, the second one after reading a theoretical fragment of a scientific paper concerning the topic of the essay) has provided some interesting observations regarding the types of used topics and comments as well as various sorts of logical relations present in the texts.

This paper discusses the conceptual structure of factual concession, in particular, the nature of its implicit content roughly equating to ‘Normally/usually if p, then not-q’ and the relationship holding between concession and causality. In contrast to many prior accounts of this complex interclausal connection, the discussion here is not based on the traditional system of truth values (i.e. propositional calculus) developed by classical logic, but it seeks to describe concessive relation from the perspective of ‘natural’ human reasoning.

The purpose of this research is to discuss the entrance of psychiatric terms in everyday Italian language. In this article, the authors make an attempt to answer the following questions: why does a man make use of such terminology (once reserved only for scientific field and now deeply-rooted in everyday language)? What are the linguistic and psychosocial consequences of it? It is stressed that a great deal of psychiatric terms, which comprise a wide range of diseases, are used improperly in everyday language. Furthermore, it will be proved that their meaning is often reduced to the level of insults or injuries.

Independently of how we decide to define plurilinguilism and how many languages should a person identified as a hyperpolyglot speak, the potentially unlimited individual’s capacity to express in many languages is one of the most striking features of the human species. Indeed, homo sapiens is multilingual by nature: the linguistic repertoire of a speaker is vast and each individual, at least theoretically, has at one’s disposal unlimited possibilities to shape own expressive resources. In practice, while some struggle to learn a foreign language, the others learn many languages competently and effortlessly. Moreover, some have succeeded in mastering multiple, say ten or more, foreign languages. Numerous theories exist as explanations for polyglotism, including the innate or acquired individual mental capacities, cultural background and specific social circumstances. The objective of the paper is to trace life trajectories of a few eminent hyperpolyglots who became fluent in multiple languages.

We have studied proverbs of “major impact” in the ouïgour language (Xinjiang in China: they use animal stereotypes to transmit their messages, which are significant for the ouïgour society. “The proverbs code the social knowledge in its popular variant and module the collective behaviours” (Bartmiński, 1998: 77). The proverbs of the Ouïgours are full of animals. It is necessary to know the specifities evoked by the Ouïgours to perceive what the employed images carry in terms of culture and social rules. Some animals are strongly connoted by the Ouïgours. The meanings of particular images, positive or negative, can vary according to the context in which they are used.

The present paper aims to highlight various problems encountered in teaching Italian to Polish students at the university level. Phraseological units, constituting the integral part of every language, deserve particular attention as far as teaching culture and mentality of a given nation is concerned. Our analysis is conducted within the framework of cognitive linguistics, with the emphasis on the notion of the Linguistic Picture of the World (as formulated by Jerzy Bartmiński). We take into consideration the role of knowledge of foreign cultural background, because its lack (or poor knowledge) in learning a foreign language can be the source of errors, especially in the case of idiomatic expressions.

The semantic description of the concept of “refugee” oscillates today between the stability of some categorization features taken from the definition of refugee under the Geneva Convention and plasticity in the discursive construction of meaning due to strong media influence. The meaning of individual phrases is analysed on a representative corpus of Slovak media discourse of 2015 from the perspective of motifs-profiles-themes.

This paper discusses the interpretation of antonymous adjectives. The example of the French adjective frais, analyzed in the paper on the basis of the object oriented approach, allows the Author to demonstrate that context is found to be highly discriminable in choosing an antonymic partner. A co-textual approach can overcome the inadequacies of classical dictionaries in the organization of the lexical structure of a language.

In this article I talk about two types of language contacts: the Hispanic-Indigenous bilingualism in Spanish America and Spanglish in the USA, including different attitudes towards them. Then I introduce the theory of translanguaging, which considers the problems of bilingualism in a quite innovative way that can contribute to the increase in the prestige of bilingualism and code
switching.

The article deals with the contrasting semantic analysis of the corpus of French and Polish examples whose inherent aspect is identical, but the so-called contextual aspect is defined differently. Aspect is now considered as a semantic category, an inherent proportion of the meaning of each predicate. However, there are differences in the typology of aspect categories, among others in French and Polish. Differences in the classification of contextual aspect belong to different methodologies, especially in the different ways of approaching semantic analyses. The aim of the article is to prove that the two ways of seeing meaning influence the view that one can have of the inherent and contextual aspect, and also to put some order in the existing classifications. The applied methodology is semantic-based grammar in the line of the Polish School of Semantics.

The aim of the present paper is to define, describe and identify a phenomenon well-known in other scientific domains, but still a virgin soil in linguistics, and that is the reification, i.e. a linguistic tendency, intention and manifestation aimed to objectify and instrumentalize human referents by means of grammatical and lexical forms, traditionally employed to designate inanimate referents, such as demonstrative pronouns in their variable (in Italian) as well as neuter (in French) variants. In order to shed some light on this linguistic practice, we discuss the reifying uses of the Italian variable proximal pronoun questo, distinguished, analyzed and described on the basis of the linguistic material extracted from NUNC (NewsGroup UseNet Corpora) corpora, and we also examine the necessary conditions for its activation, as well as restrictions and contextual clues which enable its identification. The analyses are carried out in order to observe, discover and draw conclusions about the reifying potential and reifying peculiarities of the Italian demonstrative variable pronoun "questo".

This study will deal with the functioning of the Russian verb páxnut’ in negative contexts. On the one hand, I will describe the personal and impersonal uses of the verb listing the semantic nature of its arguments. The importance of the notions of “prototype” and “functional” odor will be highlighted. On the other hand, I will more specifically analyse the verb páxnut’ in negative contexts. The corpus used indicates that in the sequence ne páxnut’ + a substantive in the instrumental, the verb may take on a metaphorical meaning. I will try to determine what factors (semantic nature of the substantive in the instrumental, presence of particles) condition this metaphorical interpretation in which ambiguity is inevitable. The notion of relevance will be used at several levels in this study.

Although the resolution of lexico-semantic problems appears to be more important in machine translation (MT), the processing of actualisation is necessary to generate coherent and correct texts. In the text, we analyse the MT from the point of view of the use of the determinants with a privileged place given to the article. In order to do so, we compare the MT of dedication to the Petit Prince of A. de Saint-Exupéry, and its Czech and Polish human translations, first of all between two languages with articles (French and Spanish or English) and then between a language with articles (French) and another one without articles (Polish and Czech). A MT between two languages with articles often gives a satisfactory result. A TA from French (a language with articles) into Czech and Polish (languages without articles) is already much more erroneous. And it is in the TA of Czech and Polish into French where we find a considerable number of errors concerning not only articles, but also demonstrative and possessive determinants.

The pronominal duplication constitutes one of the mechanisms that are characteristic of Romance languages. There are many theories that try to explain this phenomenon, some from the syntactic and the other ones from the pragmatic perspective. The aim of this article is to analyse the pronominal duplication in Spanish and Italian from the point of view of a theory of subjectification. In other words, the subjective notions in the duplicative constructions are examined.

The Portuguese language possesses various means of expressing verbal aspect, among which a significant place is occupied by verbal periphrases. Due to the fact that the issue discussed is characterized by a high degree of complexity, we have decided that the range of our considerations should be limited. We have chosen the construction andar a + inf, which represents a group of aspectual verbal periphrases and constitutes a considerable form in creating the verbal category of aspect. The main aim of the research is an attempt to evaluate the impact of mutual dependencies between various elements in a sentence (verb andar a, verbal predicate type, adverbial constructions and other factors) on creating various aspectual values, expressed by the analyzed verbal periphrasis. For this purpose, we use the corpus which consists of the examples presenting authentic
language material and coming from literary texts. Some of the examples have been created by us and, subsequently, consulted with native speakers of the Portuguese language.

The aim of this paper is to examine the three French locative verbs abandonner, laisser and quitter qualified as synonymous by most French dictionaries. All these verbs can describe the same semantic invariant which is the concept of rupture and separation and generate polysemic extension to the semantics of movement. The most common uses of abandonner and quitter are based on the same syntactic construction [SN figure V SN ground] which, in this form, does not explain any restrictions. In the following study the Author will present a detailed analysis of the characteristics of these three verbs from a diachronic perspective which, perhaps, will enable a better understanding of their functioning in language, thus making their use by non-native speakers more suited to extralinguistic circumstances.